The Janoskians’ Failed Attempt To Be Role Models

The Janoskians, an Australian boy band who, despite their best efforts, no one cares about, have released a new video clip for Real Girls Eat Cake, a song that is bad on a few levels.

The first thing is musically: it's pretty standard pop-fart-trash, with a recycled ska riff in the chorus. The second is lyrically, because it sounds like a group of 15 year olds ­ the same famous for pretending to masturbate in public in Denmark, including around young women (that's sexual assault) and over a child in a pram ­ trying to find a rhyme for “stiffy” (jiffy, iffy…) and then giving up.

Remember that the history of this band is pretty much the reason the music industry is at a death knell: Beau, Jai and Luke Brooks, Daniel Sahyounie and James Yammouni made some offensive, some marginally entertaining, and mostly boring videos on YouTube and then a label signed them to “lay down some tracks” despite the fact that at least as far as this song goes only two of them can sing, sort of. 

And finally, the song is bad because there's a level of self-righteousness to it that is just kind of unfounded. You can see that the boys do think they're doing a positive thing for women's body image. And they should be commended because of their anti-bullying stance up to this point and because well done, they haven't sexually intimidated women on camera for a while, but really, is this the benchmark for positive representations of women in music? To give them credit where it's due, there are redeeming lyrics: “When you're with me you can be who you want for fuck's sake,” amongst the bad. But really it's just sad they've decided to do so by using the same unthinking sexist jargon as everyone else, referring to the women they meet while speed dating as alternately sexy and beautiful ­­– ­only things related to appearance. And then presenting those same women in sexually explicit poses, while the boys are by song's end busy thrusting instead of dancing… It's ultimately not a positive film clip or song.

There's that small part where in the opening line they refer to a woman as a “fucking dipshit”, and then in the chorus they talk about how they're collectively “getting a stiffy from your awkward dance moves” (the five of them share the one hard-on). Yes, it is entertaining to see vulgar, colloquial language in music, the kind of language that speaks to young Australian men and women, because like it or not it is how people talk and representation matters. But it's also just part and parcel of the objectification of young women in and outside of the music industry. Make no mistake, you're meant to be ogling (at least some of) the women here who end up covered in cake. You're even probably meant to be ogling the one woman who turns out to be a man in a wig, because what is a prankster music video without a slice of homophobia on the side?

Yes, based just on that humorous woman-is-actually-man-lol gag, this song and its film clip have clearly been created by five-year-olds, but no, that doesn't excuse regarding women as eye-candy the entire time. I think it's meant to be sweet in an accepting lots of women kind of way, but it also boils all romantic affection down to lust and voyeurism.

And then of course the crux of the matter is the utter lack of body positivity here. Because body positivity means celebrating all bodies, not just the ones that have or have not been eating cake. Setting up a dichotomy between real women and those that are thin or maybe have an aversion to cake is nothing short of sexist. Went there, said it, are you actually surprised? It's unhealthy and unhelpful, because some women are thin, and some are not, and y'know what they have in common? The fact that they're all real women, because all women are real women, regardless of their size or their interest in the Janoskians. There's no need to shame someone because of their size.

But really, do we need to do this? The worst part really seems to be that someone out there thought it was genuinely a revolutionary thing to call someone who eats cake sexually attractive. It's not. It should probably go without saying that people of all shapes and sizes are attractive, whether their eating habits include pastries or not. Now I'm hungry. Someone buy me a Danish.